Infrastructure Rollout: The Waiting and Watching Game Begins

In November, the President signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which became just the 58th bill signed into law during this Congress. By contrast, the 116th Congress passed their 58th bill into law in September, two months faster. While we all know that not every law is as significant as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the 117th Congress is definitely moving slower than its predecessor and there is little to no indication of a pending acceleration.

However, none of that takes away from the potential significance of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for the equipment finance industry. The bill delineates how $1 trillion will be spent and more than half of that is new spending.

So now the process of getting that money into the proverbial pipeline begins. So for the equipment finance companies that want to help facilitate these projects, the waiting and watching game begins. The amount of funding in this bill is perhaps exceed by the breadth of where the funding is going. The bill includes funding to do some or all the following:

• $110 billion in new federal spending for roads and bridges
• $66 billion for freight and passenger rail funding
• $65 billion to expand nationwide and rural access to reliable broadband
• Grid Modernization—$65 billion overall investment
• $50 billion to pay for drought mitigation in the West, coastal resilience measures and ecosystem restoration
• Airport Renewal—$25 billion for upgrades, repairs and projects 
• Port Upgrades—$17 billion in port infrastructure upgrades and investment
• $39 billion for state and local transit programs
• $32 billion to upgrade America’s drinking water systems
• $21 billion to clean up superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine land and cap orphaned gas wells
• Targeted Spending—$16 billion for providing significant benefits to surrounding communities
• Carbon Capture—$7.5 billion for projects that capture CO2
• $7.5 billion in grants for new alternative fuel stations
• $9 billion to strengthen existing nuclear power
• $9.5 billion to establish programs to demonstrate the production, processing, delivery, storage and end use of hydrogen
• Critical Minerals and Supply Chains—$8 billion to expand efforts to mine, process, reclaim and recycle critical minerals for modern technologies, batteries and climate solutions.
• $12 billion to tackle stormwater runoff and impacts on water systems by prioritizing stormwater management and pollutant elimination
• PFAS Cleanup—$10 billion to help water utilities remove emerging contaminants including “forever chemicals” from drinking water and wastewater.

Now the process begins on how to put that funding to work. Much of this funding will be put into action through traditional government mechanisms such as the Department of Transportation’s traditional formulas that allocate funding based on population, gas-tax revenue and other factors. However, much of this funding will be based on new grant programs at the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency that will allocate funding based on a competitive grant process.


What this means is that the grant process will drive where the funding goes, and that will be less predictable because it is a new process. While we’ve gotten somewhat used to enormous sums of money being shoveled out the door by the federal government in recent years in response to the pandemic and the financial crisis, this seems to be a slight return to normalcy of having a bureaucratic (in the neutral sense of the word) process in place to determine where money goes. Regardless, there’s a lot of money entering the funding pipeline in the coming years, and opportunities abound for equipment finance companies to take advantage of that.